Browsing by Subject "kep"

The co-creation of worth, calculative devices and calculative agencies in the Danish wind power market

Karnøe, Peter(København, 2004)

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Abstract:

Wind power generated electricity offers a unique vantage point on the nature of markets and the specific organizing processes by which markets become constructed, configured, and contested. Modern Wind power generated electricity emerged in Denmark after the first oil supply crisis in 1974 when various entrepreneurial actors responded to that situation and saw wind power as one possible solution to ‘the’ problem. Today wind power is globally the fastest growing energy technology and supplies significant amounts of energy in countries like Denmark and Germany, in Denmark wind power generated electricity supplies 20% of annual electricity consumption. Although the trajectory of wind power institutionally and materially is much more robust today than 25 years ago very few thought that this technology had such a future. In the context of the 1970s with modernization and emerging nuclear power, many evaluated wind power as a relic from the past, some imagined opportunities (doomed as unrealistic), but nobody imagined that wind power should become one of the important ‘weapons’ against the CO2-related climate change at the turn of the century. However, confronted with emergent technologies outside the existing evaluative frames and institutionalised categories, it is not about being right or wrong from an objective epistemology, but about what epistemologies are used to frame the potential worth of a potential new energy technology.

This article examines the effect of variation - in the geographical operations - of international business operations on experiential knowledge development in the internationalization of the firm. Based on learning theory, this article develops five hypotheses on the effects of variation on three interrelated components of international experiential knowledge: internationalization knowledge, business knowledge and institutional knowledge. The LISREL analysis indicates that variation has a positive effect on the accumulation of experiential knowledge in internationalizing firms. In particular, it demonstrates that internationalization knowledge is a key variable which mediates the effect of variation on the other two knowledge variables.

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This paper investigates the bringing into existence of a proto-institution, that is, a new practice, rule or technology that diffuses beyond the innovative setting, but which is not yet taken-for-granted in a field. A case study, conducted real-time, shows how a collaborative group of business actors deliberately develop a proto-institution. They transpose an institutional logic from another field and combine it with an institutional logic in the focal field to resolve a field-level problem. Enabling factors include a high level of institutional heterogeneity in the focal field, the use of inter-organizational networks, and actors embedded in multiple fields. The making of the proto-institution is intentional, yet the institutional building blocks and the apparent interests of actors are institutionally embedded. The results from this micro-dynamic analysis suggest revisions to current conceptualizations of institutional change processes. Keywords: Institutional change, proto-institution, cognition, institutional entrepreneurship, innovation, collaborative networks.

Tourism offers an arena through which a place identity is imagined, negotiated and contained.
This paper compares the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and show how these countries
construct and assert their identities through tourism. They both share a common history as
Czechoslovakia, however, they are perceived differently by the outside world. These former
Eastern Bloc countries are promoting themselves in several ways and they are also
marginalising their socialist past and invoking their Central European identity. The Czech and
Slovak search for destination identity takes into account tourists’ demands and perceptions.
This paper introduces the concept of the orientalist tourist gaze, and demonstrates how
orientalism may manifest in tourism. Data on how these two countries are imagined were
collected in Denmark.
Keywords: destination identity, host society-guest interaction, impact of tourism, orientalism

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It is a delicate matter to trade spot products and financial derivatives in energy markets. Op-
posite to bond and stock markets, the underlying assets are real products and a significant part
of the demand for them represents a real need for the products, which can only be substituted
away with some difficulties or, in some cases, only in a prohibitively costly manner. This is
particularly true in the spot market, where the demand is almost always met, but where the
spot price processes can be quite different from the spot price processes conventionally used in
the pricing of derivatives. This pattern of real demand is also the main reason for the existence
of the well-known convenience yield in energy markets.

Although they have developed very much in isolation from each other, we argue the theory of
entrepreneurship and the economic theory of the firm are closely related, and each has much to
learn from the other. In particular, the notion of entrepreneurship as judgment associated with
Frank Knight and some Austrian school economists aligns naturally with the theory of the firm.
In this perspective, the entrepreneur needs a firm, that is, a set of alienable assets he controls, to
carry out his function. We further show how this notion of judgment adds to the key themes in
the modern theory of the firm (i.e., the existence, boundaries, and internal organization). In our
approach, resource uses are not data, but are created as entrepreneurs envision new ways of
using assets to produce goods. The entrepreneur’s decision problem is aggravated by the fact
that capital assets are heterogeneous. Asset ownership facilitates experimenting
entrepreneurship: Acquiring a bundle of property rights is a low cost means of carrying out
commercial experimentation. In this approach, the existence of the firm may be understood in
terms of limits to the market for judgment relating to novel uses of heterogeneous assets; and the
boundaries of the firm, as well as aspects of internal organization, may be understood as being
responsive to entrepreneurial processes of experimentation.
Key words: Entrepreneurship, heterogeneous assets, judgment, ownership, firm boundaries,
internal organization.
JEL Codes: B53, D23, L2

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Multinational enterprises (MNEs) are expanding their global reach, carrying their products and brands to ever more remote corners of the world. They encounter business environments that vary not only from their country of origin, but also vary greatly amongst each other. Thus foreign investors have to adapt their strategies, most notably their marketing and acquisition strategies, to the local context. In this paper, we outline why globalisation drives MNEs into emerging economies, and we provide conceptual frameworks that may aid investors to adapt their strategies to emerging economy contexts. MNEs have to develop a portfolio of local and/or global brands that matches their competences with local needs. If they aim for market leadership they may pursue a multi-tier strategy, but this needs to be supported by an appropriate foundation of global and local resources. This strategy in particular requires the acquisition of complementary local resources controlled by local firms. However, acquisitions in emerging economies are inhibited by institutional obstacles and weak local firms. Thus, foreign investors may pursue staged, multiple, indirect, or Brownfield acquisitions to build their projected operation. We illustrate our proposed strategies by analysing how one multination enterprise - Carlsberg Breweries - has developed its operations in three very different emerging economies: Poland, Lithuania and Vietnam.

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This paper questions the prevailing notions that firms within industrial clusters have privi-leged access to ‘tacit knowledge’ that is unavailable – or available only at high cost – to firms located elsewhere, and that such access provides competitive advantages that help to explain the growth and development of both firms and regions. It outlines a model of cluster dynam-ics emphasizing two mutually interdependent processes: the concentration of specialized and complementary epistemic communities, on the one hand, and entrepreneurship and a high rate of new firm formation on the other.

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Participation rate on the Greenland labour market: situation of year 2000
A goal is that a large part of the population of normal working age is employed. The participation
rate is one of the statistics used to describe the performance of the economy in this respect. Two
sources are used to arrive at an estimate of the rate both for Greenland in general and for four
regions defined by four so called growth towns: Nuuk, Sisimiut, Ilulissat and Qaqortoq. They are
Statistic Greenland’s publications on employment and on unemployment. There are some
difficulties using the available data: the employment and unemployment surveys refer to periods
whereas the potential workforce is counted at a date. Furthermore persons with yearly income
below an arbitrary limit of 40.000 DKK are sorted out even though they should contribute to the
number of full year employed. The participation rate is found to be much higher in Nuuk than in the
other regions. For Greenland as such the number is in line with figures for Western Europe and
North America. Characteristics of people not in the work force are looked for. To some extent a
connection exists to the number people receiving pension as disabled, people in education, and
those on leave because of childbirth, but the relation is imperfect and great differences are seen
between regions.

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How does population dynamics influence outcomes in situations with public good
characteristics? The present paper answers this question by analysing the evolution of costly
cooperation in a multi-group population. Building on insights first developed in modern
biology the idea of viscous population equilibria is introduced (a population is said to be
viscous when a (sub)population of players is spatially or genetically clustered). A simple
model then analyses how the combined effect of viscosity within multiple subgroups and
different levels of between-group segregation influences the evolution of cooperation. The
results suggest that a key issue in the evolution of cooperation is the shifting balance between
the need to protect cooperators and propagation of the tendency to cooperate.

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In this paper, Mie Augier provides a rich description of the intellectual traditions, the signifi-cant people and academic institutions that in some way or another made a difference to Davis Teece’s own intellectual development. In this sense, it is a dynamic account of the emerging career of a distinguished scholar - but not only that. It is also a description of the co-development of three major disciplinary fields; organization theory, economics and strategic management during three decades or so. David Teece has made several important contribu-tions, perhaps most notably to economics (on the theory of the firm and transaction cost eco-nomics) and strategic management (on dynamic capabilities) while drawing upon organization theory and notions such as organizational routines and bounded rationality. In addition, Augier also provides an interview with David Teece, a true scholar still unsettled with what has been achieved so far - in all three fields: "Maybe I’m wrong; and maybe technology is a special case and maybe technology and organization do not belong at the core of the theory of the firm. My intuition tells me otherwise." (David Teece, quoted in this issue).

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Economists have long acknowledged that the structure of the family (number of
offspring, marital status, etc.) plays a crucial role in important economic decisions (e.g.,
labor supply, demand patterns, portfolio choice, educational attainment). In this paper we
investigate the link between family structure and corporate decisions of family firms.
Even though there is considerable anecdotal evidence on this link, there is no systematic
study. This paper fills this gap. To this end, we assembled a unique dataset with
accounting information from 1995 to 2002 of the universe of privately held firms in
Denmark. Our dataset includes the family trees of the owners as well as personal
information about all family members. This information allows us to identify family
firms among privately held firms. We find that, using a 50% definition of control, 89%
of privately held firms are family firms. We focus on the decision whether to choose a
family member or an outsider as the next CEO. We show that the larger the pool of
potential heirs, the higher the probability of family transition. Also we document that this
probability is significantly lower when all offspring are female. Finally, family conflicts
(proxied by divorce or multiple marriages) reduce the probability of family transition. In
a robustness check we show that there is a causal effect from family structure to
corporate decisions. We do this by instrumentimg the number of children with sibling sex
composition and by restricting the sample to one in which founders had their last child
years before founding the firm.

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We consider a simple model of international trade under uncertainty, where
production takes time and is subject to uncertainty. The riskiness of production depends
on the choices of the producers, not observable to the general public, and these choices
are influenced by the availability and cost of credit. If investment is financed by a
bond market, then a situation may arise where otherwise identical countries end up
with different levels of interest and different choices of technique, which again implies
differences in achieved level of welfare. Under suitable conditions on the parameters
of the model, the market may not be able to supply credits to one of the countries.
The introduction of financial intermediaries with the ability to control the debtors
may change this situation in a direction which is welfare improving (in a suitable sense)
by increasing expected output in the country with high interest rates, while opening up
for new problems of asymmetric information with respect to the monitoring activity of
the banks.
Keywords: Capital outflow, financial intermediaries, moral hazard
JEL classification: F36, D92, E44

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An Analysis of the Reengineering of Intermediation by Electronic Commerce

Brousseau, Eric(København, 2001)

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Abstract:

Efficiency arguments explain why commercial intermediaries exist and will continue to be involved in the exchanges despite the spread of digital networks. Commercial intermediaries provide producers and consumers with a set of information, logistic, securization and insurance (and liquidity) services. By bundling these services and by dedicating assets and learning capabilities to their production, commercial intermediaries enable to economize on transaction costs. Digital network per se cannot enables transacting parties to benefit from such efficient providers of intermediation services. Rather than establishing direct relationships among producers and consumers, the Internet will support a re-organization of existing intermediation chains, because traditional intermediaries will reinforce their ability to provide these service by using ITs. The analysis of the role of commercial intermediaries thus leads to a better understanding of the futures of e-Commerce. In turn, e-Commerce provides New-Institutional Economics with a stimulating case to analyze the economics of commercial intermediation.

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All knowledge is context dependent. The relevant context is the social community where it resides, i.e. the ‘epistemic community’ formed as groups of people define and legitimize the knowledge they possess. In the mutual engagement in a common enterprise, epistemic communities develop, maintain and nurture the codes, tools and theories that provide the basis of their practice. Commonalities of code, tools and theory facilitate both voluntary transfer and involuntary imitation of knowledge within communities, also ones spanning organizational boundaries. Conversely, knowledge transfer between different epistemic communities, whether desired or unintended, is often cumbersome and fraught with difficulties. In order to achieve effective integration and cooperation between its various professional communities and subcultures, firms must therefore undertake investments in boundary-spanning mechanisms. Since these investments are specific to the context in which they take place and to the transactions that they enable, they cannot easily be organized through arm’s length contracts. Firms exist because they have a relative advantage over markets in the integration of diverse knowledge. However, the associated capabilities need not translate into a relative advantage also in the transfer of knowledge, i.e. knowledge exchanged between members of the same epistemic community. Within communities, knowledge disseminates with relative ease both intentionally and through emulation. Knowledge thus acquired can generally be applied also outside the context of the exchange and the effort or investment expended in its acquisition is not transaction specific. The governance mode applied in such exchanges is therefore determined by strategic and contextual factors, including those of traditional transaction cost logic.